Suspicious History

Suspicious aims at providing teachers and students of history and related social sciences with ideas for critical thinking about past and present applied to documentation, images, and historical writing. Issues of perspective, bias, storytelling, patriotism and heroism, as well as interpretation are distributed among different chapters, along with guidance for making discussion provocative and involving, in light of principles for rethinking history.

Jack Zevin is an educational heretic and that is a good thing and a great strength of his latest book. Instead of celebrating the latest innovations, he points out that good history teaching, good social studies, has always focused on student analysis of primary and secondary sources and putting together the puzzle of the past to understand the present. If we had been teaching history and social studies this way for the past sixty years, maybe the world and the United States would not be in the predicaments we find ourselves in as we move through the third decade of the 21st century.--Alan Singer, professor of secondary education and director of social studies education, Hofstra University; author of Education Flashpoints, Fighting for America's Schools, Suspicious History challenges contemporary history instruction by providing clear guidance regarding how to teach history in a more thoughtful way. Those who apply these ideas will be teaching in the best tradition of social studies education. This book provides rational and practical means to achieve more powerful and thoughtful history education.--Ronald Banaszak, Executive Editor, The Social Studies

Jack Zevin is a lifelong student and teacher of history and the social sciences with an expertise in social studies education. He is an advocate for interactive and critical thinking methods of thinking about history in the Socratic tradition of questioning everything.